genderjumper | Entries tagged with writing

I really love this article on Salty about the difference between disliking and hating (specifically astrology).* It's a pretty concise rundown of all the meaningful ways people can engage astrology, with or without woo, and resonates with my experiences.

I've never formally studied astrology, just thumbed through an increasingly-dated copy of Sexual Astrology I picked up in high school and engaged topics at varying levels with friends and lovers.

In my early 30s, I sat down and made a spreadsheet (I'm not sure I've posted much, but I love spreadsheets and find all sorts of innovative ways to process information in them). I listed over a hundred lovers, close friends, and family members from across my lifespan, and between my memory and Facebook, inserted their birthdays to estimate their sun signs. Then I just... studied it. I didn't think hard about the archetypes from the funny papers, I grouped people together based on the Zodiac breakdown and just meditated on their commonalities, their ineffable similarities. And it made a LOT of sense to me.

To some extent, I updated the traditional archetypes with some of my own (for instance, I sometimes link Virgos to a prince/ss vibe), but for the most part I just let the patterns speak for themselves, and they've held up well.

I really don't know much about signs other than sun, but what traits I do associate with each sign I consider kind of a foundation, a launchpoint for personal growth (for better or worse). For instance, as a Pisces myself, I associate pretty strongly with sensitivity, creativity, and open-mindedness, but since I have structured my life around these traits (e.g., I don't take myself too seriously, I create without expectation, and I almost never experience indecisiveness any more) I sometimes call myself an "ascended Pisces".

I'm always eager to talk about these sort of metaphysical explorations from a lived experience or empirical perspective.

*The only downside of the article is a pretty glaring editing error I attribute to the magazine/site. I published an essay through them two years ago that had similar problems, because whoever is behind it seems to have very little patience for communicating with writers. I also welcome similarly minded places to submit my next essay, though I'm currently working on one I think will fit Salty well.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Up too late
Current Music: I was just geeking out on Lily Allen

Had a call with my mom after her outpatient surgery today. Halfway decent convo, and I learned some things that sparked ideas for upcoming writing:

Apparently we lived on Tierney at some point, in the apartments off Lancaster? I assumed she meant the south side of Lancaster, behind the Foot Locker, but maybe she meant the ones that got torn down and turned into a Food Lion, which didn't last long and soon after became the Vietnamese church with a high iron fence. Mom said there were shelves built into the walls and that my brother and I liked to climb into them. She also said when she tried to bring home a guy named Glenn that I took a stand and absolutely would not allow him to sleep with her. This young moralizing cracks me up given how my adult life has gone -- quite a few partners who have been married to someone else, and at least a couple or three who had children sleeping a couple of rooms over.
Tierney Apartments or whatever it's called is the final place where we lived of which I have zero recollection (I can list every place after that -- I think... there may still be one missing) and sparked an idea to trace the many moves of my life. As Mom said today, "We got evicted a lot," and I think it would give greater context as to why it's so novel that I've been in the same house for nearly 20 years and almost never NOT had one foot out the door.
We also talked about Santa Claus, because I have an early memory of walking in on her and my stepdad wrapping presents and then still believing they came from Santa Claus when I saw those very presents opened a couple weeks later. There isn't much more to say on Santa Claus with my fam-o, so I might throw in the time that I played Tooth Fairy for my younger brother because parentification came pretty natural to me at that point.
Santa Claus with my adoptive grandparents was a whole other story, though, and that'll make a great one.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: not getting evicted, hooray!
Current Music: "Never Loved a Girl" by Aerosmith

In therapy yesterday, I reminded myself that my push to post more on DreamWidth is not SOLELY a matter of following my muse in a low-stakes, high archival context, but to get back in the habit of writing. Period. Therapist also asked how long it had been and I couldn't really answer.

I was always full of ideas before caregiving (and to some extent after), but if I had to pinpoint I'd say the corporatized nonprofit job in 2022-2023 killed my writing drive. No, that can't be right; I started an ebook that winter (though of course I haven't finished it...). It really must've been my burnout last year (and even then, I reviewed everything I watched on Letterboxd)... Was there really much of a lull in my writing, or did it just deviate from old habits for a while (respectively: academia, marketing, self-marketing, movie reviews).

Maybe this is just picking up the slack from pulling away from Facebook. Which is just fine with me!

Current media: just finished Doom Patrol (way better and queerer than I could have expected), Little Richard: I Am Everything, Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, and a disappointing listen through Wet Leg's new album, Moisturizer.

Current Mood: obliterated
Current Location: about to be bed
Current Music: Little Richard!

A trans family in my extended community are about to GTFO Austin (lucky them!) and held a sendoff party today. One of my dear ones is also very dear to them, but disabled and geographically isolated from both them and me, so I asked if I could pick her up and drive her down. She gladly accepted.

( On the way down )

On the drive home, I recorded audio of a potential essay called, "How to Break a Resilient Heart" (or something similar) that felt a bit cathartic to get out of my head. It was a mournful how-to written from the perspective of the hurtiest relationship end I've ever experienced, which haunts me 8 years on. I also sang through a couple of albums, playing with my pitch and range.

I haven't felt this creative in a long time.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: No longer I-35
Current Music: Esthero: I Don't Wanna Let You Go

Poking at my resume, I looked up an old blog and was surprised to find it only contained a couple or three dozen entries. I ended up reading the first five entries or so and skimming the rest. And it got me thinking about how my mind used to race and interconnect ideas well enough to dash off 1000-word entries like that. (Not that I was ever much of a blogger... my output was too sporadic and often went far too long.)

I'm not surprised that my "voice" is so different -- the early entries sound so unlike me! But also, I had to ask myself if I keep telling myself and others what a good writer I am simply out of habit. What if that changed after my last illness? Or COVID? Or general disillusionment? As Janet Jackson might say, "What have you done for me lately?"

I think it'll take a few months to answer, but I needed to put the question out there.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: headed to the kitchen

( On Journaling... ) The vast majority of the social sciences as we know them are so steeped in "Western" hegemony that studies will be impossible to replicate under other economic, cultural, and technological circumstances. Seeing the present moment, vis à vis pandemic(s), war(s), and corruptions(sss), as roughly an apex or precipice culminated on everything that came before (and with very little room to go anywhere but down), we have a unique birds eye view if we take the time to appreciate it. We have way more information about humans than has ever before been accessible, and we are at the peak of human understanding before it either crashes back down or is handed over to computers to process on our behalf (or hell, maybe both). Why not try to use this purview to leave something behind that is beyond ourselves?

( Something that might help the next great society avoid some of our hubris and failings... )... but there's no academic hub I can find that pulls it altogether and says, "This is how human relationships and cultures reflect their material relationship with time." I don't think it could help being metaphysical (even spiritual), but then the emergence of sciences are rarely the cold, calculating laboratories we bias today.

Anyway, if you know any good books on sociotemporality (whatever its authors call it), let me know?

Current Mood: cerebral
Current Location: the present

Feeling a distinct loss of momentum in many directions, as well as the arrival of my seasonal mini-mania, which means my brain will be spinning a lot and doing so in negative directions -- if I allow it to. But if I don't allow it to, I run the risk of accomplishing nothing and accomplishing things is the heart of my discomfort...

( Read more... )
That's the thing, isn't it? Crafting a routine that matches my neurodivergent traits and my unanchored lifestyle without reinforcing the society I'm trying to escape? I haven't tried in a long time. Maybe it could go differently this time?

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Boy as Venus -- Bjork